In the Sydney Morning Herald Alex Brown speaks to John Buchanan, now the coach of Kolkata's IPL franchise and a man whose radical ideas perhaps don't seem as outlandish in the wake of the IPL explosion.

"This is just the beginning," said Buchanan, prior to the Indian Premier League's first match between Kolkata and Bangalore tonight. "Administrators need to make very good decisions over the next few years. I believe all three versions of the game can coexist, but I think this particular form of the game has the potential to take off round the world.

"I can see cricket getting to a stage where in the next three to five years the world is split into zones, like in soccer, with the winner of each zone playing off in an annual world series under a roof somewhere. Players will be spread round the world. Here at Kolkata we have eight or nine internationals, and I think that's a model you'll see more and more of."

Some have likened Buchanan to a bread-board toting street preacher in recent years, proclaiming the end of the world as we know it and making wild predictions of what form cricket's future might take. But as the league and other Twenty20 competitions have taken hold, the former Australian coach's views no longer seem so radical, suggesting he may yet prove a soothsayer.